Vince Gilligan: Kingpin of the Year 2013

No one made us cringe more, think more, or just plain care more than the geeky, self-effacing, devious mastermind behind Breaking Bad

If there was one person this year who gave us a National Cultural Moment—the kind of shared group experience that isn’t supposed to happen anymore, at least not without the word Bowl appended to its title—it was Vince Gilligan. The unfailingly polite Breaking Bad showrunner spun the story of a chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-dealer into operatic drama. GQ caught up with him in the aftermath of The End.

It’s been a week and a half since the Breaking Bad finale. How are you feeling?

It’s quiet for the first time in a few months, and I feel pretty good. I feel…just kind of tired. Like I got the flu or really long-lasting jet lag or something. After the Emmys and the press surrounding the final episode, all the adrenaline kind of leaked out of me, and I’ve been watching a lot of old TV, you know? Watching a lot of, like, Columbo and just lying around. I feel kind of—and this is an odd thing for me to say, if you know me well—I feel at peace about the whole thing. It’s kind of a rare feeling for me. It’s good.

I think everybody knew the ending would be a big deal, but it really turned into as big and feverish a phenomenon as I can remember. What happened?

Have you ever been sitting at your desk and you crumple up a piece of paper and, without even looking, you just toss it over your shoulder and it goes straight into the wastebasket? You didn’t think about it. You didn’t stress about it. You just did it. And now that you’re thinking about it, you could never do it again in a million years, no matter how hard you tried. That’s what this was like. We worked our butts off, but everybody works their butts off in TV. We tried to make the best show it was humanly possible to make, but you know, the guys on According to Jim did the same thing. As to why this thing hit…I could make up some stream of nonsense, but honestly…I wish I could explain it, because then I might have a fighting chance on TV in the future. The truth is, I just have to be satisfied that it happened at all.

Are you tired of explaining and defending the final episode?

** **I really haven’t. My time-honored philosophy of not going on the Internet has held me in good stead. I recommend it to everybody. At this point, I’ve become rather phobic about it.

Your writers haven’t been so shy. They’re all over Twitter and elsewhere—talking about the show, posting pictures, talking about their body parts....

** **I didn’t really know that. Tom Schnauz did send me a couple of examples of his Twitter feed by email. I was like, ’Man, you’re never going to be president now."

They’ve also, to a kind of unheard of degree, been out there discussing and interpreting the show. Is that cool with you?

** **Again, I didn’t know most of that was going on. Except for Tom talking about his taint. But it sounds fine to me. I mean, they worked on the show as hard as I did. They have every right to talk about it. It’s theirs as much as it is mine.

So much of the fan discussion came down to the question of whether the viewer was rooting for or against Walt and whether you were, in effect, upbraiding those who still wanted to see him get away with it.

I’ve kind of bemusedly scratched my head a bit, over the seasons, at the idea of people still rooting for Walt. But I don’t think they’re wrong. I just think it’s sociologically interesting.

Oddly enough, I think I started to root for Walt a little more in the final couple of episodes. I would argue he did the most nasty, sadistic thing he had ever done in our third-from-final episode, where he says to Jesse, I watched Jane die. But in that same episode, he also did a couple of the kindest and most selfless things he had ever done. That episode really encompassed the duality of this character. He could be good, and he could be bad.

I kept going back to something you said a few months ago, about the ending of MAS*H—how it wasn’t the surprising ending, but it was the satisfying ending. The question that had been posited at the beginning—will they ever get home?—was answered at the end.

We talked a lot about it in the writers’ room, and I realized that this was our version, such as it is, of the MAS*H ending. In the first episode of Breaking Bad, it is posited that the main character will die sooner rather than later, that the clock is ticking on him. It just felt right that he expire at the end of the series. Having said that, one of the slight twists of that final episode is that the thing that he was told in the first episode would kill him is not the thing at all that kills him. It’s the bullet that he’s received in the midst of trying to save his former partner.

What was Walt’s plan if he didn’t accidentally catch that bullet?

You know, that’s a good question. In other words, would he have tried to get out of the line of fire, or would he have stood there? Of all the things we discussed, I don’t know that we ever talked it through. I know that in our minds, he definitely went there to kill Jesse along with everybody else.

But not necessarily to commit suicide?

I think he’d want to relish his victory. If I had to guess, it was like, The cops aren’t going to take me, no matter what. I’m probably going to get killed in the midst of this. I may have to shoot it out with any survivors, or who knows what.…

But you don’t have to guess. It’s yours!

Yeah, I know. But, really…it’s not. I mean, yes, it’s mine. But it’s also everyone else’s, at this point. Up until these episodes aired, they were simply mine and the writers’ and the crew’s and the actors’. Now they sort of belong to everybody. Like, it’s up to the viewer to decide what happened to Jesse.

What do you think happened to him?

My personal feeling is that he got away. But the most likely thing, as negative as this sounds, is that they’re going to find this kid’s fingerprints all over this lab and they’re going to find him within a day or a week or a month. And he’s still going to be on the hook for the murder of two federal agents. But yeah, even though that’s the most likely outcome, the way I see it is that he got away and got to Alaska, changed his name, and had a new life. You want that for the kid. He deserves it.

You’ve always said that Walter’s journey is from Mr. Chips to Scarface. Did Jesse have a journey? Or was he just a bystander?

One thing I guess he learned along the way was what the audience knew from the first season: This kid really doesn’t belong in this business. And when you first meet Jesse, in that pilot episode, he’s really kind of a prick. He’s just kind of a douchebag. But I wrote that before I met the actor. And Aaron Paul is so sweet and kind in real life that those qualities rubbed off on the writing and therefore on Jesse. I mean, he’d still say Yo, bitch and smoke a lot of pot and be kind of annoying, but we realized he had heart. That’s why it’s always interesting to me when I hear a showrunner say, I knew how this thing was going to end right from the get-go—eight or ten seasons in advance. I’m impressed by that, but I also think it can be kind of self-limiting, because it limits the discoveries you tend to make along the way.

Did you always know that Walt’s original business partners, Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz, were going to play such a crucial role in the end?

I thought for the last couple of seasons that we were probably done with them. Not because I didn’t want them back in the story, but I just couldn’t figure out how they would be germane to the proceedings. But then I met this young fan named Kevin Cordasco. He was this very sweet young guy, 16 years old, and he had had cancer since he was 9. This poor kid; half his life he’d had cancer. And he had two wishes. One of them was that he wanted to go see the Yankees play, and the other was that he wanted to meet some of the actors from his favorite TV show. So I got to meet him, and he was a wonderful guy. This was back in October of 2012, and he looked like he was probably not long for this world. I remember asking him, Do you want me to tell you how it ends? As long as you keep it secret? And he said, No, I want to watch it. So I said, What would you want to see?— certainly not promising anything but just making conversation. He thought about it for a minute and he said, I’m wondering about Gretchen and Elliott. I’d like to know more about them. Do you think we’ll ever see them again? It got me thinking. And I went back to the writers’ room and told them about it, and it got them thinking, too. So Gretchen and Elliott came back in very large part because of Kevin. The crime, the sadness of it, is that he never lived to see the ending. He passed away in March.

Given everything that’s happened, is there a part of you that feels a Walter White-like vindication now? That wants to go mad with power and shove the show’s success up everybody’s ass?

I don’t know whose ass to shove it up. I’m trying to think if there are any old girlfriends who treated me badly. The reaction has been so stratospherically beyond anything I would have expected. I’m certainly not the Dalai Lama, but there’s nobody I can think of that I want to say to, Yeah! Suck on that, bitch!